*Shudder*

Downloaded MSN Messenger 7 (beta) last night. And the only way to sum it up is: yurgh.

Firstly, they've tried to make it look nicer and more friendly. What has really happened is that they've added more crap to it. There are now even more of those "tabs" on the left hand side of the contact list, and although you can now change the order in which they appear, there is no longer an option to disable them. Who actually uses the tabs? They're annoying, pointless and just take up space. At the bottom of the contact list there is a search bar. Handy you may think, but it uses MSN search which couldn't find a needle in a haystack. I'd much rather stick with google. Again, this search bar cannot be removed, thus taking up more space.

The conversation windows are also different now. The text input box takes up half the window, which is just unnecesary imo, as I only ever need it to be 2-lines tall. Your display picture is now displayed at the same size as the person you're talking to, but it can be shrunk, or hidden like in previous versions. Next to the boxes for smilies and backgrounds you now get 3 others. 1 lets you send "winks", larger, flash-based emoticons that also have sound emebedded in them. Whilst these may look pretty, I certainly find them annoying. By default they play back automatically, something which I was quick to disable, mainly due to the fact that in previous BETA releases the "wink" code has been open to exploit. You can also send a "nudge", which plays a sound and shakes both the person your speaking to and you conversation window briefly. While this may have a practical use, say someone hasn't responded to you for a while, it can become quite annoying when it is used over and over. I'd go as far as to say this is the single most infuriating thing about this new version of messenger. Lastly, you are given an option to download "packs", which can contain things such as winks, emoticons or backgrounds. From what I gathered, they are not free. At the bottom of the window is a small line of text informing you that you can download these, essentially another advert in addition to the main one displayed at the bottom of the contact list.

There are some nice new features though. It certainly does look a lot prettier, and for newer users I guess it will be simpler to use. You can now choose to set your status before you login, for example you could set yourself so that you appear as offline everytime you log-on. Your current display picture is now shown at the top of the contact list, alongside your display name, and whenevver somone signs in it will show you theor display picture as well as their screen name. However, the good points are few and far between, and are vatsly outnumberd by the bad. Also, consider the fact that it currently consumes a whopping 30Mb of RAM; which just goes to show that the new features are just bloat-ware.

For my money, the best IM client is still Trillian 3.0. This does everything MSN 7 can do, except winks/nudges (which I had turned off anyway). Okay, it may not have the same smileys (it has better ones, and lots of them), and you can't have things such as backgrounds, but I hardly use them anyway. It also lets me connect to MSN/AIM/YIM/ICQ/JABBER/IRC all at once, which is incredibly useful.

And thus, this concludes exactly how bored I am right now.